From a youthful dream of travelling to Africa to the culmination of a research project carried out over more than ten seasons in Kenya, the author takes the reader on a journey as a member of a group of biologists determined to find out why some bir...
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A paradigm shift
In early 2008, Wamiti emailed me about his intention to build twenty-seven nest boxes in the Naivasha area during the month of February so that they could be occupied during the coming spring season. The budget was very small as he only had to pay for fuel, the daily wages of two helpers, food and the construction of the boxes. I thought it was a good idea and I told him so, but I was aware that we would need not only new places and new partners, but also new approaches. We might be stuck in our original goals, but provocative scientific horizons were gradually opening up before us that we could not and should not fail to explore.
I sent the money to my colleague as soon as I could, and in late February or early March he wrote back to confirm that the job was done. In addition to Oserian, Crater Lake and Carnelley's campsite, he had left boxes at the Elsamere Field Studies Centre, a small farm near the shore of Lake Naivasha, and at Kijabe Limited, a farm owned by a woman called Sara Higgings, which housed the offices of the Lake Naivasha Riparian Association, a non-profit organisation founded in 1929 by the landowners around the lake, of which she was honorary secretary. He also told me that he was planning a trip in mid-May to check all the boxes he had installed so far. Naturally, I gave him the go-ahead and started making arrangements to get the money to him in time.
In early July I received the field report number four from Wamiti. The first thing I noticed was that he had not gone to Kakamega Forest. He argued that the invertebrate cover had been too high in the last survey and suggested that the next survey should be postponed for three or four years. I was surprised by this decision, knowing Wamiti's meticulousness and self-discipline in the field. A few months later I realised that the political situation in the country was behind his decision. At the time, he did not explicitly mention the risk he was taking by travelling to the west of the country. It was only later, when Vicente and I returned to Kenya for another box check in the autumn, that he explained the specific reasons for his actions.
The report noted low occupancy by species of the starling family. Hildebrandt's and blue-eared starlings had nested in the boxes, but only at Mpala's ranch, where they had occupied six of them. Hornbills were still using many of the nest boxes in Samburu. Numbers had dropped slightly, probably due to the reduction in the diameter of the entrance hole to the boxes we made last year. However, several of them were unexpectedly being used by the grey sparrow, a close relative of the house sparrow. The grey sparrow is not a troglodytic species, it does not normally nest in holes in trees or rocks, and we had no information that it might occupy nest boxes. It seemed like a mockery of nature: species with an obligate dependence on cavities, such as many species of starlings, seemed to ignore our property offer, while others, considered by science to be consummate nest builders, took to the boxes to our despair. We still did not understand why our structures were attractive to species from so many different groups and yet failed to attract the interest of our target species.
